"Now, the typical endpoint for an immortal is the wildly inhuman immortal. It's kind of an asymptotic limit for formerly human immortal characters. They approach it eventually no matter how long it takes for it to become noticeable. Basically, when they live long enough, their moral compass kind of wears away. The needle's still pointing somewhere, but they don't really know where anymore. If all human life is ephemeral and fleeting anyway, does human life hold value? Does human suffering? And without the fear of death, compassion for others, or unfinished personal goals, what's left to motivate them?"
We All Die Someday, right? What happens when this concept is flipped on its head? Immortal characters lack this essential characteristic that otherwise all humans share in common. Unless immortality is something that can be shared with everyone, they'll also outlive the general population. The latter part is also true for characters that are Long-Lived.
These characters react to this in different ways. Some distance themselves from mortals from the very start, seeing themselves as above them or simply wanting to avoid the pain of losing friends and lovers. This is especially common for nonhuman characters. Others try to bring themselves down to the same level, but they will remain alive and healthy as the people around them grow old and die. This is a common source of angst, and some immortals ironically become Death Seekers. However, after outliving so many, some immortals will suffer from serious emotional fatigue. They stop caring or begin to change their mind on mortals after realizing just how short-lived they are. This can lead to serious Blue-and-Orange Morality.
In other words, the absence of death and aging makes it inherently more difficult for some immortal characters to care about mortals. Fear of death is one of the most common motivations and the weirdness of meeting someone for the first time after so long becomes even weirder when one of them has changed and the other remains the same. Immortality can serve as a barrier between those that possess it and other mortals. Immortals won't necessarily be cruel to mortals, as a consequence, but it can be difficult to allow themselves to care too deeply about people they know without a doubt they will lose all too soon. Shutting themselves off emotionally can become a much-needed defense mechanism, and for some it becomes a habit and then an integral part of their personality. They stop caring for so long that they forget how.
Distinct from Immortality Immorality in that the means of immortality is not necessarily evil, and Smug Super in that the immortal character does not necessarily have any power over mortals beyond the inability to die. Related to All Are Equal in Death, as immortal characters are distinctly not equal in this respect. See also Unfeeling Heavens, which can overlap when applied to divine beings such as gods or angels, and Death Means Humanity, in which the proven mortality of a non-human character makes human characters empathize with them.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- Element Lad goes through this trope in the Legion of Super-Heroes arc "Legion Lost". After saving his teammates from being trapped in a space-time rift, Element Lad is accidentally left behind within the rift and stays trapped there for billions of years. During that time, he manages to watch the stellar life cycles of stars, improves his powers to the point that he can create entire worlds, and becomes known as the Progenitor of his new respective cosmos. Unfortunately, his time spent in isolation drives him to become considerably callous to all mortal life due to his immeasurable lifespan and he begins purging any creature that he sees as a "variant" to his designs under his firmly cemented god complex. After seeing him, Brainiac Five admits that Element Lad is not evil as the Legion understands, but he's working at a level so far removed from conventional life that his view of life is callous by default.
- Death of The Sandman (1989) averts this, she still cares about humanity deeply even though (or perhaps partly because) she only gets to experience being human for one day every one hundred years.
- Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan became immortal in a Freak Lab Accident, and while he hasn't been immortal for very long, his perception of time is non-chronological, which means his subjective memory extends much further. Throughout the book, he's apathetic to anything going on around him because his perspective is so vast that anything humans do is inconsequential to him.
Fan Works
- Purple Days: Inverted big time with Joffrey Baratheon. After spending more than a century stuck as a Groundhog Peggy Sue, forced to repeatedly suffer for his blunders until he completely re-evaluated himself, he's transformed himself from the utterly monstrous, cowardly, spoiled, un-empathetic, and sociopathic Enfant Terrible we know him as into a genuinely caring, disciplined and personable young man with a lot of compassion for the smallfolk and levels of love and friendship for nearly everyone around him (sans Cersei and Jaime). To further hammer it home; when Joffrey is in the Oxcross Loop, he's fully aware that Westeros and all its inhabitants in this timeline are invariably doomed, yet he still feels compelled to help people out where he can; giving Tommen in this timeline a reassurance about how to be strong going forward, and extending royal aid to help out the starving smallfolk of King's Landing.
Film — Live-Action
- The Hobbit: Thranduil the Elvenking displayed signs of this trope in the second film when he coldly stated that Thorin could stay in his cell and rot for all he cared, because "a hundred years is a mere blink in the life of an Elf!", but he truly qualifies as this in the third film when he decides to abandon the Dwarves and the Men of Lake-Town to face Azog's Orcs alone after having had enough of watching his soldiers get killed. When Tauriel calls him out on it, he indifferently retorts:
Thranduil: Yes, they will die. Today, tomorrow, three days hence, a hundred years from now. What does it matter? They are mortal.
Tauriel: You think your life worth more than theirs, when there is no love in it? There is no love in you!
Literature
- In The Bartimaeus Trilogy, this is one of the reasons why genies typically don't get along with their mortal summoners. In particular Bartimaeus often mocks impressive architecture and other human accomplishments, as he's seen better.
- In The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, the Kalachakra all possess Born-Again Immortality via "Groundhog Day" Loop, being destined to restart their lives at the moment of birth regardless of how many times they die. Given that they can't reveal their natures without being locked up in asylums or tortured by government agents for their knowledge of the future, Kalachakra often grow detached from mortals and the notion of lasting consequences; the members of the Cronus Club are downright apathetic towards "Linears", and rarely stir themselves from their hedonistic lifestyles unless a future-destroying apocalypse is on the way. Harry himself is considered a bit of an oddball because he still cares about Linears after a fashion and believes that his actions have lasting consequences in other timelines... and even he has no qualms about regularly murdering a Serial Killer.
- Nettle & Bone: The Northern Kingdom's official Fairy Godmother is said to have outlived all her feelings — magically protecting The Evil Prince, cursing the entire royal line, and sitting at home for decades all mean equally little to her. She's equally unconcerned to finally die.
- Repeat is centred around protagonist Brad Cohen getting stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop that begins in the womb and ends on the night before his fortieth birthday. Initially enjoying the experience, Brad finds himself becoming progressively alienated from humanity as his second chance expands into immortality; there's nobody he can relate to, he can't reveal his true nature without seeming insane, and the fact that he can't get his old life back only makes him more isolated from new relationships. At one point, he realizes that he's somehow managed to make it through an entire lifetime without making any friends at all.
Live-Action TV
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Professor Randolph, an Asgardian who's already millennia old, has issues relating to humans who live much shorter lives than he does. For instance, he initially has issues considering people misusing his berserker staff to be a problem because as far as he's concerned they'll all die soon enough anyway, and he tries reassuring Ward about the staff's darker effects by saying it'll wear off in "a few decades."
- Stanton Parish from Alphas goes through this trope because of his nature as a Hypercognitive with a Healing Factor that has kept him in his prime for over two centuries. The negative side effects of his powers include how his peak functioning and extensive lifespan gave him an isolated perspective and an inability to relate to anyone around him, making him callous. This is compounded by continuous loss of loved ones, as he admitted to having outlived and buried at least 31 grandchildren up to the present day.
- Babylon 5:
- The two Abusive Precursors, the Shadows and the Vorlons, manipulate the younger races but don't seem to care for their fates. Most of the other older races, the "First Ones", stay away from the younger races and either don't care about them or are actively hostile. The Vorlon Kosh does take an interest in the main characters but is killed for "breaking the rules" of the Vorlon-Shadow conflict. His replacement is this trope at best. He turns on the younger races along with his fellow Vorlons when they unleash their planet killers and has to be put down.
- Lorien was this trope until he met Sheridan and then decided to help him end the Shadow war.
- This was a subtle running theme on Bewitched. Magic users, who in this universe are an entirely separate race, have incredibly long lifespans numbering into the centuries (and possibly even millennia). As such, witches and warlocks tend to have an incredibly blase attitude about life — when you're a high-level Reality Warper, non-magical problems pale in comparison. Endora and Uncle Arthur even joke about being on "different sides" during the American Civil War as if it was a friendly rivalry between sports teams rather than an extremely bloody conflict. It also explains the Fantastic Racism witches and warlocks feel toward humans: since they're only around for at most a tenth of an average witch's lifespan, why would they be concerned about mortals? Early in the series, Endora tells Darrin that this trope is why she disapproves of Samantha marrying him: Sam is doomed to outlive him by hundreds of years, and she doesn't want to see her daughter get hurt.
- Doctor Who: Defied. This trope is the reason why the Doctor always has a companion. This is stated outright in "The Runaway Bride" when Donna sees the Doctor drown an alien, as she tells him to never go too long without one for this very reason.
- Forever (2014): Adam turns out to be a case of this, he admits to Doctor Henry Morgan that he was originally as compassionate and empathetic as Henry is now. To the point that the event that caused his first death was attempting to protect Julius Caesar from the assassins. However, after two thousand years, he has become distanced from humanity and overall bitter with existence in general, to the point he no longer cares about random innocents' deaths, as they are insignificant to him and only targets Henry simply cause interacting with another immortal is the first new concept he's faced in millennia. Henry is tormented by the possibility that if he doesn't find a cure for his own immortality, he too might one day become as callous.
- The Librarians (2014): Jenkins is initially uninterested in aiding the Librarians-in-Training, preferring to stick to his studies and research. He even gives a speech about how he used to care but felt that he was ultimately accomplishing nothing. But a bit of defrosting and he becomes much more willing to help.
- In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, witches have similar problems to the Bewitched example listed above. They live for millennia and age extremely slowly (the show begins in the mid-1990s, and flashbacks prove that Hilda and Zelda look identical in that decade as they did in the 1700s). Furthermore, witch culture is incredibly hedonistic and centers on instant gratification. As such, nearly every magic user we see is pleasure-seeking, immature, and generally totally uncaring about anything beyond their own immediate whims. A few specific examples appear in various episodes:
- Sabrina's Aunt Vesta lives in a "Pleasure Dome" where the desserts make you thinner, there's a giant crowd of adoring fans just behind a door, and anything someone might want is instantly conjured up for them. Sabrina enjoys herself while visiting, but eventually realizes that all of the accomplishments are empty because she isn't earning them.
- In a Season Three episode, Sabrina's Cousin Marigold commits the greatest crime imaginable — breaking the Masquerade to a mortal — and loses her powers as a result. She later remarks that it was a blessing in disguise, as having to do things on her own has made her genuinely happy for the first time in her centuries-long life; magic made her totally apathetic and incapable of real emotion.
- One episode has Hilda and Zelda use "Man-Dough" to (literally) cook up a perfect date for Sabrina; they then use the leftover dough to make some dates of their own. The resulting men are fully sentient beings who are doomed to live for a matter of hours before collapsing back into dough — and neither Hilda nor Zelda shows even the slightest amount of ethical concern over this (it helps that the men themselves are aware of their own brief lifespans and don't seem all that worried about it).
Tabletop Games
- In most Dungeons & Dragons settings, the Long-Lived races like dwarves and elves look down on humans for being impatient and reckless with their short lives.
Video Games
- Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura: Humans have some of the shortest lifespans of the sentient races, and members of the more Long-Lived races have a tendency to treat them as foolish children who never live long enough to see the consequences of their actions. One dwarf, discussing the environmental damage caused by human logging, notes that he's spent human lifetimes contemplating what sort of stone to use for a sculpture, compared to the kind of world-changing decisions a human can make in a few cycles of the moon. Another theorises that human ambition stems from them living in fear of their own death and being driven to make a mark on the world before they die, so "They act first, think second, and feel last of all". The chapter of the manual discussing elves also notes that, while humans and elves sometimes form romantic bonds that result in half-elf children, an elf woman who looks no older than 17 to a human has probably seen 5 generations of humans turn to dust in her lifetime, so it's little wonder elves get tired of human interaction in their old age.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- One of the reasons the Daedra have Blue-and-Orange Morality when compared to mortals and are frequently dismissive of them is that Daedra are fully immortal and able to form new bodies for their souls to inhabit if their physical form is slain. Because Daedra never truly die, it is impossible for them to fully understand how mortals think — mortals live finite lives and face constant reminders of this, and their ability to simply accept this and continue existing without succumbing to despair is something no Daedra can comprehend.
- Like Daedra, dragons seem incapable of understanding mortal life. As timeless beings who have always been, and always will be (unless a dragonborn eats their soul), the very concept of mortality is alien to them. This was weaponized by the first Tongues to create the Dragonrend Shout, which is the concepts of "mortal", "finite", "temporary" spoken in the Dragons' own language. A dragon subjected to this Shout temporarily loses the ability to fly or Shout due to being forced to experience these alien concepts.
- In Fate/Grand Order, Goetia, Beast I, intends to destroy all of human history and replace it with one in which all humans are immortal; due to his creator's foibles and his own hangups, he's stuck on the idea that an eternal existence is necessary to abolish all suffering. He doesn't listen when he's repeatedly confronted with the fact that if he succeeds, he will have effectively eliminated all motive for humanity to progress or do anything at all, leaving them barely better than plants. It's not until his plan is in ruins and he's halfway into the grave that he sees the value of mortality as he experiences it first hand.
- In Genshin Impact, the Raiden Shogun's ideal is eternity. She has a difficult time understanding why the ambitions of mortals are valuable, partly because she sees them as minor in the grand scheme of things, but also because she is afraid of change. This is why she enacts the Vision Hunt Decree. Being defeated by mortals and getting to see for herself what the world is like in the present changes her mind, as she realizes mortal wishes are more meaningful than she thought.
- Despite being evil himself, Porky Minch provides an example in Mother 3. He's nearly immortal from all of his time-traveling shenanigans post-EarthBound (1994), but isn't fully immortal and is on the verge of dying. Following his defeat at the hands of Lucas and co., he chickens out and hides in the Absolutely Safe Capsule created by Dr. Andonuts. This provides him with absolute immortality and prevents him from ever being damaged, but the caveat is that he can never escape the capsule. Granted, he doesn't care, and rubs it in the face of those opposing him, knowing that he'll now live forever. Word of God from Shigesato Itoi states that Porky ended up surviving the Heat Death of the Universe, and still doesn't care that everything else in existence is dead, taking solace in the fact that he gets to live forever.
- Säid the Mummy of The Secret World takes a very relaxed view of mortal tragedies; thanks to his centuries of unlife and his career as a businessman, he's detached to the point of callousness, scarcely demonstrating any regret for the casualties of the Atenist uprising. Indeed, Säid's biggest concern is the cost of rebuilding once the Atenists are finally put down, to the point that he's already suggesting using the disaster as a loss leader so his fellow mummies can recoup their losses. Even his shame over the indirect role he played in the Tokyo Incident is motivated less by remorse for all the people killed as a result of his dealings with the Morninglight and more by a need to erase an embarrassing mistake from his resume. In fact, Säid's so detached that he spends most of his time on the balcony of the abandoned Hotel Wahid rather than among his allies in al-Merayah... and the hotel is infested with ravenous ghouls who have already slaughtered the mortal staff.
- Stella Glow: This is the case of Dr. Veronica, the last remaining human from the "technolomy" era (based on real-life present). She lived for so many years thanks to feeding on angel wings that she grew indifferent towards humanity's fate, though the main characters eventually convince her to fight alongside them to save the world.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: Invoked by Marceline the Vampire Queen in the episode she's introduced in, "Evicted!". She's not actually an example, though.
Marceline: I'm not mean, I'm a thousand years old, and I just lost track of my moral code.
- Invincible (2021): In Omni-Man's Motive Rant, he explains that humans don't have any sentimental value to him because his species can live for thousands of years.
- South Park: Played for Black Comedy in the "Coon and Friends Trilogy". It's revealed that Kenny's countless deaths and resurrections are the result of his parents visiting a group of Cthulhu-worshiping cultists while his mother was pregnant, cursing him with the power to come back from the dead while still feeling and remembering the pain of every fatality. To make matters worse, the curse includes Laser-Guided Amnesia — people can see Kenny die right in front of them and will forget about it moments later. While Kenny angsts about this at first, he eventually becomes apathetic to his situation and, at one point, casually shoots himself in the head rather than deal with the stupid antics of his friends for another minute.
- Wakfu: Qilby the Traitor has a supernaturally eidetic memory which forces him to perpetually retain all his past lives' memories across his reincarnation cycle, functionally making him eternal. As a result of several millennia of enduring this and knowing it will never stop, Qilby doesn't give much of a damn about anybody's feelings except his own anymore. He's willing to callously sacrifice an entire world and all its inhabitants so he can continue selfishly cruising the stars and keep his overloaded brain distracted, even tormenting and trying to kill his extended siblings (knowing they'll only reincarnate with their memories wiped if they die) for trying to stop him; with the justification that all mortal lifeforms are nothing but passing specks of dust that come and go constantly in the larger universe.
